Saturday Stuff

I know I mentioned that I would replay Jason Kander's GREAT ad, so I'd better do it before the year ends (he was the Dem running against Roy Blunt for the U.S. Senate from Missouri, a contest Blunt won but by a tighter margin than the so-called experts predicted)...



…and with the spirit of that ad in mind, Kyle K. tells us here that Bernie Sanders is telling all of us to stand up on January 15th to protect our health care (NSFW)….



...and Chris Hayes talks with Rick Perlstein, author of “Nixonland,” about parallels between Number 37 and the demented child-king about to take the reins of power on 1/20/17 (God help us – thanks once more, everyone who voted for this assclown, Jill Stein or Gary Johnson, and also to the “Bernie or Bust” crowd)…



…and kudos to Cenk and TYT for raising a half mil from their audience to stand up for actual quality journalism; excellent (and here is yet another example of corporate media stupidity)…



...and I also failed to note the passing earlier of Al Brodax, responsible for "Yellow Submarine"...



…and yeah, I think I’ll let John Oliver have the last non-musical video word here (incredibly NSFW – some good things happened for yours truly this year, and I’m grateful, but overwhelmingly I share these sentiments)…



…and did you know this year that almost an entire band died? That would be Keith Emerson and Greg Lake of EL&P (best wishes for a long and happy life to Carl Palmer)…



…and what else can you say about 2016, the year that (thank God!) is about to come to a close?

Remember the actual hope and optimism last summer, when we were talking about the better-than-even-money chance that the Dems had of taking back the Senate? Including the return of Russ Feingold in Wisconsin? I mean, they CAN’T POSSIBLY return that big stiff Ron Johnson for six more years, could they?

Well, they did, incredibly enough. And by the way, as a resident of the commonwealth of PA, I know I have no gloating rights whatsoever in that we had the chance to do the same thing to that corporatist fraud Pat Toomey, and he won another term also. In fact, the only Repug U.S. Senators who got sent packing (in what should have been a “change” election for real, since it was also a presidential election of course – and the less said about that, the better, I know) were Repugs Mark Kirk in Illinois and Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire, hardly right-wing firebrands (Kirk went down in no small part because he made fun of the ancestry of Tammy Duckworth, a decorated veteran maimed in the Iraq war, and Ayotte’s political demise was aided by the presence of a third-party candidate and an incredibly popular Democrat and former governor in Maggie Hassan, who won).

Oh, and remember the fleeting moments when – what do you know? – the Dems, according to some statistical models, actually had a chance, however slim, of retaking the House depending on the margin of a projected Clinton presidential win? And we know what happened there also, particularly in PA-08, where the voters, in their utterly dunderheaded stupidity IMHO, refused to vote for a great progressive, Dem Steve Santarsiero, and instead chose to fill “Mikey The Beloved” Fitzpatrick’s vacant seat with his brother, who has no experience holding elected office (as opposed to Steve, who served for four years on the Lower Makefield Board of Supervisors and four years as a PA House Rep).

Yeah, it sure was ugly. The whole damn thing was drowned in dark money payoffs, voting machine malfunctions and other forms of suppression, a tidal wave of fake and orchestrated news against Hillary Clinton (to say nothing of negative ads, some of which were true and many of which were bogus), the supposed revelations from James Comey about alleged Clinton Email illegality based on Huma Abedin’s server that her then-husband Anthony Weiner used for porn (to say nothing of the supposed Clinton Foundation “scandals”), and dutiful stenography on the part of our utterly bought-and-paid-for political/media/industrial complex, the net effect of which was to thoroughly regurgitate all Republican-friendly talking points with hardly any push-back in response. And oh yeah, this was aided by the actual, documented, mind-numbing incompetence of the Hillary Clinton campaign. And all of this led to the voters making the most horribly uninformed electoral choices possible, including electing (again, notwithstanding voter suppression and actual fraud for real) Donald J. Trump as president.

Well, I’m going to have a good, stiff drink on New Year’s Eve, take some down time at some point, and then try to figure out how we’re going to attack this mess all over again. But before I do, I want to thank everyone who has spent any time whatsoever at this site over the last year and extend my wishes for all good things in 2017 (and never forget the words to this song - for the belated 70th birthday of Patti Smith).